Archive for category: Forschung

Just in time for the start of the European Heritage Year 2018, the theater collection of the TU Berlin goes online with over 5,000 objects. The cooperation project between the TU Berlin and the Beuth University, financed by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, after two years has successfully reached it’s goal – the development and digitilization of the theatre collection of the TU Berlin.

The collection houses well-preserved archives from 1939 to 1969 to more than 500 theater buildings mainly in Germany, Austria, France, Slovenia, Poland, the Czech Republic and Russia. The pictorial materials – floor plans, sections, photographs and written documents – give a unique overview of the state of Central European cultural buildings in the mid-20th century: On the one hand the collection provides an inventory of the visionary developments of the 20s and 30s, on the other hand the objects document both stagnation and also deconstruction during the Third Reich from 1933 to 1945. At the same time, the collection gives valuable insights into the visions of the architectural emergence of post-war modernism until the 1960s and 1970s.

“A chemist by learning, a physicist by calling and a mechanic by birth” – that is how Emanuel Goldberg (Moscow 1881 – 1970 Tel Aviv) described the poles of his varied scientific and entrepreneurial activities in almost all fields of image technology. In Leipzig and Berlin, he explored the basics of photography. In Dresden, he developed novel cameras and apparatuses for the knowledge management of the future. After his violent expulsion from National Socialist Germany, he founded one of Israel’s first technology companies in Tel Aviv.

The exhibition focuses on Emanuel Goldberg’s estate that his family recently gave to the Technische Sammlungen Dresden. The photographs and instruments, writings and drawings, and the remains of Goldberg’s private experimental workshop form the starting point of a search for traces in the prehistory of our information society.

In this exhibition, photographers and filmmakers, artists and engineers, scenographers and students from Berlin and Leipzig present the results of their artistic and experimental
engagement with the ideas and the life of Emanuel Goldberg. Alongside the originals from Goldberg’s estate, photo and film installations, replicas of his perception experiments,
and models of his knowledge machine are on view and can partially be tested.

Our research project of the digitization of the collection of theatre architecture granted by German Research Foundation (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft DFG) moves forward: almost 1000 objects have already been captured and scanned. In October, Prof. Dr. Bri Newesely (Beuth HS Theatertechnik) and project leader Franziska Ritter presented first results of the research at OISTAT (International Organisation of Scenographers, Theatre Architects Technicians) conference in Sevilla. With their lecture ‘Mapping Theatre Architecture’ they could promote the project and further extend the research network.